SOTHEBY’S REPORTS A LOSS IN GUARANTEES; NATIONAL EISENHOWER MEMORIAL FINALISTS

Carol Vogel reports in the New York Times that ten days ago, Sotheby’s reported a loss of fifteen million dollars in guarantees—the undisclosed amount that auction houses promise to sellers regardless of the outcome of a sale—from recent auctions in Hong Kong and London. Millions of dollars of art went unsold at those September and October sales, with many works going for well below their estimates. Since then, auction-house officials have been busy trying to get sellers to lower their expectations. With the net worth of so many buyers plummeting, auction houses have been trying to persuade sellers to lower their reserves (the undisclosed minimum price that a bidder must meet for the art to be sold). “Prices of all assets have fallen—stocks, gold, oil, real estate—and it would be unrealistic to expect works of art to be immune to the market’s pressures,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America. “We are actively encouraging consignors to set reasonable reserves.”

In other news, the Los Angeles Times reports that a competition to pick a designer for the National Eisenhower Memorial, slated for a site just off the Mall in Washington, DC, is down to seven finalists, including Frank Gehry and Moshe Safdie. The short list also includes Berkeley-based landscape architect Peter Walker, who has teamed with Michael Arad on the forthcoming 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero; San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz; New York firm Rogers Marvel; and a pair of Chicago architects, Ralph Johnson (of Perkins and Will) and Ron Krueck. The competition to honor the thirty-fourth president is being run by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission and the federal government’s General Services Administration.